by Larry Brody
And now, due to popular demand, the second of the “Zeitgeist Boom”/”Drunken Monkey” columns from wherever the hell it is I first published them (It’s fiction, dammit! Don’t forget – it’s fiction!):
ZEITGEIST BOOM!
#2
Mean Woman Blues
By Drunken Monkey
I’m in the Airstream, on the not-so-foamy pad that passes for a bed, playing a sweet shuffle beat on a little gal I met at the Chimacum feed store across the highway, when my cell phone rings.
Well, it doesn’t ring, actually, it starts thumping out the opening of “L.A. Woman.” Which, if you’re old enough to remember that song, you’ll know is totally out of sync with my fucking, or anybody’s, for that matter.
I’m so thrown that the little gal (who wasn’t really all that little, but she’d showed me a picture of the tiny thing she’d been back in the day and that was who I was banging in my mind) raises up her head and turns so she can see me, and her Absolut-soaked voice gives out an angry, “What the hell? I was just about to make it. Get back on track, monkey man!”
“You were just about to make it? What d’you think I was gonna fucking do?”
The phone stops. Both of us realize it at the same time.
“Hurry, babe,” she says. “Now, now now!”
“Honey, I’m so there—”
I push her face down into the mattress, pull up her butt—
And I remember another time, back in ’68 or ’69, when hearing “L.A. Woman” threw me off so badly that the genuinely little thing I was humping on stomped out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and out of the house without bothering to put on her clothes.
Probably, she didn’t even remember she had clothes. Because we weren’t fucking in just any bedroom in any house, we were fucking in the back bedroom of Eighty Something Something Wonderland Avenue, off Laurel Canyon in La La Lovely L.A., in a session that’d already gone on for two nights and two days of ‘shrooms and acid and shit I can’t recall. The real wonder of that night wasn’t that I’d managed to get my pecker up in the first place, it was that I still knew what a pecker was and that I had one.
“Christine, my little mescaline queen! Don’t go….”
Then I stopped. From the next room I heard Jim’s voice:
“Well I just got into town about an hour ago.
Took a look around, see which way the wind blow….”
Now when I say I heard Jim from the next room, I mean that literally. The Wonderland Avenue house belonged to Morrison’s keyboard-playing pard in The Doors, Ray Manzarak, and I was crashing there after being tossed out of my little Hollywood bungalow by a certain Ms. I can’t name because she’s still alive and miserable mean, who came home with me one night after a recording session on Cahuenga where I was teaching the music lovers of the world how to play drums.
I tripped downstairs and saw Morrison and Manzarak at Ray’s beat-up upright. Jim was wailing, but he stopped when he saw me.
“What’re you doing, standing there naked and watching me, man?”
“Your goddamn song made me lose my hard on,” I said.
“You’re lucky, man. Everything makes me lose my hard on. Fucking downers.” He turned to Ray. “I’m thinking we should shitcan this damn song anyway. Fuckin’ Po’ Boy hates it.”
“Fuckin’ Po’ Boy” was their producer at the time. And his opinion of “L.A. Woman” is more proof if anybody needs it that the minute you give a dude a title with “producer” in it his brain turns into a turd so hard it won’t float.
So I’m in the Airstream, remembering all this and how great that Wonderland Avenue bitch was in bed, and my fucking gets right in the groove.
Until the trailer door bursts open and this Paul Bunyan sized guy crashes in, just as both me and whoever are once again about to cum.
“Arlene! You damn whore!”
“Baby! Shit! It’s not what you think. This gentlemen was helping me load the Nutrena into the truck —
“Don’t talk to me about loads, bitch—”
My cell rang again. I rolled off the pad and grabbed it, keeping myself out of their way.
“Yo, Monkey!” It was the Kid Editor. “Just want you to know our first issue was a big success, and everybody loved your column. We need more…except we’re changing the format so we need it to be half as long.”
Which is a good thing because that’s when Chimacum Bunyan caved in my nose and I stopped being able to think about anything, except one last word:
“Asshole!”
I, too, many years ago, lived up Laurel Canyon, across the street from the Country Store, and one morning walking up from Sunset after a very long night I spotted this young lady sitting on the curb and wearing a ring not only on every finger, but every toe, too. I asked her what they were there for? And barely glancing up at me she answered, “They’re just there.” Who could ask for more than that? gs